Could of Fooled Us! (In Fact, You DID!)

"No American president ever wants to go to war," Mrs. George W. Bush said last night, from the podium of the "We're All Moderates In This Party" National Convention.

This ... patent fabrication, about the husband who very early this year bragged to Tim Russert that he was "a war president," trying not to strut while sitting down.

So there goes Laura Bush, down the drain.

But then we're into George W. Bush's quadrennial spasm of "compassion," to leaven his hard war-mongering conservatism, and as someone else said today (somewhere, I forget), the war he used to strut for has become deeply unpopular, and he's being forced to dragoon the whole family to this crummy current effort, even those poor pitiful party-girl twins last night, who ARE, after all, chips off the old block. Too bad they're daddy's girls. (I'm still willing to cut Laura a tiny bit of slack, given her untenable position. But I'm also remembering that overly sharp endorsement of her husband's position on NO.STEM.CELL.RESEARCH, as though the librarian in Laura Bush had to shush, and in no uncertain terms, the loud whispering of Nancy Reagan. I'm rapidly losing faith in Laura!)

But get a load of the hard right Elizabeth Dole, whose heart has hardened right along with her power helmet of hair: "Two thousand years ago a man said, 'I have come to give life and to give it in full.' In America, I have the freedom to call that man Lord, and I do. In the United States of America, we are free to worship without discrimination, without intervention and even without activist judges trying to strip the name of God from the Pledge of Allegiance, from the money in our pockets and from the walls of our courthouses. The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. The right to worship God isn't something Republicans invented, but it is something Republicans will defend."

This is what the Republican Party has become, what Garrison Keillor recently called "Christians of convenience." The country-club Elizabeth Dole, claiming to know the Jesus cat as "Lord," is about as convincing as hearing a Roman Catholic like Virginia Foxx trying to imitate a Southern Baptist, by talking about the "guiding hand of the Lord." Puh-leaze!

(Here's the relevant paragraph from Garrison Keillor's "In These Times" essay: "The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us...." We recommend you read the whole thing, and mark your calendars, 'cause Garrison will speak at Farthing Auditorium on Oct. 6th, we hear.)